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Republican health care executive Rick Scott has taken a lead in Florida's Republican gubernatorial primary while another self-funding candidate, real estate billionaire Jeff Greene, has spent his way into contention in the state's Democratic primary for Senate, a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday shows.

Scott, who announced in April that he would challenge state Attorney General Bill McCollum for the GOP's nomination for governor, now leads McCollum by 13 points, 44 percent to 31 percent. Scott, the former CEO of the Columbia/HCA hospital chain, has already spent more than $11 million on television ads pitching himself as a political outsider with business experience and attacking McCollum as a career politician.

McCollum has countered with television ads featuring an endorsement from former Gov. Jeb Bush and has attacked Scott over a Medicare fraud case his company settled with the federal government for $1.7 billion.

In the Democratic Senate primary, Greene is taking 27 percent of the vote to Rep. Kendrick Meek's 29 percent, with 37 percent of voters still up for grabs.

Like Scott, Greene has come under attack for his business record, and the Meek campaign has hit him for making a fortune betting against the housing market. With more than two months to go before Florida's Aug. 24 primary, those attacks appear not to have sunk in yet.

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Readers' Comments (1)

Interesting that this story dodges one of the main reasons for McCollum's poor showing: his use of over 100,000 dollars of state funds to pay for George Rekers as an anti-gay expert, although Rekers had been completely discredited by even very conservative Arkansas courts as producing no useful research or work. Of course, Rekers being outed as taking trips to Europe with a male hustler he hired to "carry" his baggage, plus the photo of Rekers handling his own baggage did nothing to make McCollum's confidence in the scam artist any better. Remember, Mr. McCollum: Jesus died to redeem your sins, not your politics. McCollum also got caught claiming a state agency had hired Rekers and he had nothing to do with it, yet the agency produced signed documents from McCollum ordering that Rekers be hired. A big liar.